ReHacked #98: Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM, Ads coming to Telegram, One more way recruitment is terminally ill and more
Portugal makes it illegal for your boss to text you after work in 'game changer' remote work law
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Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM. In 3 Years, They'll Have to Do It Again | WIRED #copyrights
It's a cliché of digital life that "information wants to be free." The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities—the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments—are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.
Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.
Ads coming to Telegram #internet #socialmedia
One more way recruitment is terminally ill…
Remote workers in Portugal could see a healthier work-life balance under new labour laws approved by the country's parliament.
The new rules approved on Friday are a response to the explosion of home working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Portugal's ruling Socialist Party said.
Under the new rules, employers could face penalties for contacting workers outside of office hours. Companies will also have to help pay for expenses incurred by remote working, such as higher electricity and internet bills.
Pilot Says Too Many Jumpers Outside Led To King Air Spin - AVweb #aviation #security
The pilot of a King Air C90 that went into a spin while skydivers prepared to jump over South Africa on Oct. 14 says the plane departed controlled flight because too many jumpers got out of the rear exit at the same time. The dramatic video of the incident has gone viral and been featured on network news shows but it was all in a day’s work for the pilot, who identified himself as Xei. “The stall and subsequent spin happened when we allowed too many jumpers on the outside step, causing an aft center of gravity and excessive blocking of the airflow to the left horizontal stabilizer. The nose then pitched up beyond the controllability of the elevator,” he said in a post that accompanied the video on YouTube.
Ask HN: Any indications Copilot scans your local files? | Hacker News #software #privacy #security
Yes, other files open in your IDE may also be scanned.
From terms of service [1] (Which I'm sure everyone reads)
> when you edit files with the GitHub Copilot extension/plugin enabled, file content snippets [...] will be shared with GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and used for diagnostic purposes to improve suggestions and related products. GitHub Copilot relies on file content for context, both in the file you are editing and potentially other files open in the same IDE instance.
How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet #internet #copyrights
More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.
And it’s managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. And it’s all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers.
Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors | Reuters #technology #energy #climate
France will build new nuclear reactors to help the country lessen its dependence on foreign countries for its energy supplies, meet global warming targets and keep prices under control, President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday.
With concerns over purchasing power topping opinion polls five months before the presidential election, at a time of soaring energy prices, Macron said the decision to go for new reactors was essential to keep prices "reasonable."
"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," Macron said in a televised address to the nation.
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email #internet
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more money.
It’s funny, I think he’s said this exact thing before.
Uh huh. 3 “final” emails over 5 years.
Google loses challenge against EU antitrust ruling, $2.8-bln fine | Reuters #internet
Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe's competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world's most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
Update to YouTube Dislike Counts - YouTube Community #internet
Creators: You’ll still be able to find your exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio for each video–only if you’d like to. Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio if they would like to understand how their content is performing. There are many other metrics available to help you analyze your video and channel performance, so review this Help Center Guide that covers YouTube Analytics tools and reports (especially recommend visiting the “Engagement tab” in Studio and checking out key moments for audience retention).
Viewers: You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations, the only change is you won’t be able to view the number of dislikes on the video. We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video–still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform, and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
Brain Implant Translates Paralyzed Man's Thoughts Into Text With 94% Accuracy #science #engineering #futurism
A man paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2007 has shown he can communicate his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant system that translates his imagined handwriting into actual text.
The device – part of a longstanding research collaboration called BrainGate – is a brain-computer interface (BCI), that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret signals of neural activity generated during handwriting.
In this case, the man – called T5 in the study, and who was 65 years of age at the time of the research – wasn't doing any actual writing, as his hand, along with all his limbs, had been paralyzed for several years.
Astrophysicists unveil glut of gravitational-wave detections #nature #physics #astronomy #space
Gravitational-wave observatories have released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, bringing their total number of detections to 90. The new crop of 35 events includes one featuring the lightest neutron star ever seen, as well as two clashes involving surprisingly large black holes.
The detections come from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) sites, in Louisiana and Washington State, and their sister detector, Virgo, in Italy. They were recorded during 21 weeks of operations, beginning on 1 November 2019, that racked up an average detection rate of one event every 4.2 days. Since then, the collaboration has expanded to include the KAGRA detector in Japan, which started making observations in February 2020. The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration describes its results in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint repository.
Fatty acid found in palm oil linked to spread of cancer | Cancer | The Guardian #health
Scientists have shown how a fatty acid found in palm oil can encourage the spread of cancer, in work that could pave the way for new treatments.
The study, on mice, found that palmitic acid promoted metastasis in mouth and skin cancers. In future, this process could be targeted with drugs or carefully designed eating plans, but the team behind the work cautioned against patients putting themselves on diets in the absence of clinical trials.
“There is something very special about palmitic acid that makes it an extremely potent promoter of metastasis,” said Prof Salvador Aznar-Benitah, of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Barcelona. “I think it is too early to determine which type of diet could be consumed by patients with metastatic cancer that would slow down the metastatic process.”
How Safari Ruined My Tuesday · Fly
In the whole of the internet, there's only one, lonely Stack Overflow thread talking about this issue affecting mobile Safari. And it includes tiny HTML and CSS example reproduction. You can see the bug in action below. The link remains in a none state an clicks aren't registered when we remove the class.
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